Staffing costs represent a large portion (e.g., 60-70%) of the total expenditures in a contact center. Achieving the right staffing level in the contact center helps to balance costs with customer service. Overstaffed contact centers needlessly increase costs, while understaffed contact centers result in lower levels of customer satisfaction.
It is therefore desirable to accurately predict the amount of work that will come in to a contact center and match that work with sufficient staff having appropriate skills to handle the work load. However, this scheduling process can be a complex and time consuming job. Accordingly, what is desired is a system and method for aiding the forecast of contact center work load and to schedule staff to handle the forecasted load.
Traditional contact center work force management (WFM) software provides functionality such as forecasting, scheduling, and tracking to increase the efficiency of an available pool of agents (labor). These offerings have more recently been expanded to address the needs of multi-site, multi-skill, and multi-channel environments.